Eyeing the World – Climate Musings

Monthly Archives: October 2014

I have previously shown how global temperatures rose in three distinct and abrupt steps from the 70s to the 00s – one in 1979, one in 1988 and one in 1998 – and at all other times, not at all. These three steps occurred relative to the SSTa curve of the NINO3.4 region in the equatorial zone of the central-eastern part of the Pacific Ocean. Before, between and after the three steps, global temperatures appear simply obediently to follow NINO3.4 without any sign of a continued slow, but steady upward drawing away as if from a ‘steady rising background forcing’:

Figure 1.

My opinion on the much talked about “Pause” or “Hiatus” in ‘global warming’ still said to be going on (the considerable final, level stretch of the upper blue curve in Figure 1), is thus naturally coloured by this understanding of how global temperatures normally progress through time, as exemplified by the period from 1970 till today.

Within this perspective, the “Pause” is but one of many temperature ‘plateaus’ between sudden steps up or down (the last time it went down was back in 1964, before the ‘modern warming’). The relevant questions are: When did the last step occur? When will the next one take place? And will it go up? Or down?

At the present time, I would still maintain that the last well-established step in global temperatures happened in 1998, following directly in the wake of the mighty 1997/98 El Niño. Simply because not enough time has elapsed to be able to say anything for certain about more recent events.

But there are definitely a couple of things at work today that deserve some close attention. Continue reading →

Anyone with even a slight interest in the whole climate issue thing should be familiar with the iconic ‘Earth energy budget diagrams’ allegedly quantifying – by accounting for the various energy transfer fluxes to, from and within the Earth system – the so-called “atmospheric radiative greenhouse effect” (rGHE) and how it forces the global surface of our planet into a mean steady state temperature much higher than at a pure solar radiative equilibrium. The prototype of these diagrams appeared in the Kiehl and Trenberth 1997 paper (K&T97) “Earth’s annual global mean energy budget” (Figure 1), apparently already there setting the gold standard for compiling these budgets, for its successors have all essentially been showing the same thing, with only minor modifications to the original.

Figure 1.

At first glance, the diagram might seem a bit confusing. What are we actually looking at here? What are we looking for? How to make any sense of it all? How to extract its core substance, its central message to the world? Robert A. Rohde of ‘Global Warming Art’ attempted to present the gist of the K&T97 Earth energy budget diagram like this:

Figure 2.

You will notice how, in Rohde’s rendition of the K&T97 budget, the energy being continuously supplied to the surface from the Sun appears to be completely disconnected from the energy later going out from the surface. 168 W/m2 come in, but 492 (!!!) W/m2 go out. And by all means, you will find that same peculiar decoupled relation in the original diagram too, even though it might be a bit harder to immediately hone in on. Continue reading →

In July I wrote a blog post where a strange and very conspicuous step change indeed in global mean temps relative to the trended AMO (North Atlantic SSTa), occurring across the 8-year period of 1963-70, was pointed out:

Animation 1.

As you can clearly see, the two curves generally follow each other in remarkable style all the way from 1860 till today, except for the relatively sudden and substantial global upward shift taking place across the last half of the 60s, being firmly established by the end of 1970. After this point, the curves are back to tracking each other to an equally impressive degree as before the shift, only now with the global raised 0.25 degrees above the North Atlantic.